A thorough article in last week’s Press discussed the lack of specificity of planned uses of the renovated Town Hall. It noted that: “While the board had originally wanted to hold public outreach meetings to talk up Plan 1B before asking voters to authorize moving ahead, those meetings never materialized.” While the board did say they would hold such meetings, I doubt they ever wanted to. The charge to the construction committee for the current project, approved at a BOS meeting in August, is clear: “The Construction Committee shall not schedule any public forums or engage in any public outreach without the specific prior approval of the BOS.”
At the BOS meeting on Oct. 27, 2014, Town Administrator Bragan stated that, since BOS meetings were public, they constituted public outreach. “It is public outreach because we’re on TV, we’re talking about it, people can see and comment. … There’s a number of people who have not done that regularly, because there’s a number of people in any community that you go to that don’t care.” Selectman Wallace followed up: “I talk to people, people talk to me. I think that this has been on our agenda ever since last fall as a topic we discuss. People can certainly listen on TV, watch the reruns on TV. They can approach any of us.” Then—perhaps forgetting the meeting was being televised and recorded—she dismissed people who did not “approach” the selectmen: “[T]here’s that wonderful saying: ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.’” (The YouTube video, from about 2:11:20 to 2:17:40, gives these quotes in context.)
This inspired “Haiku to the Voters About Town Hall.”
You are dumb horses;
Led to water, did not drink,
Yet complain of thirst.
It’s a good thing that BOS meetings are public and wonderful that they’re available on YouTube, but both common sense and standard professional practice tell us that such meetings do not, in any way, constitute public outreach. The BOS’s stance is ignorant, arrogant, and insulting.
Billy Salter
Elm Street
